Jérôme Dokic

Situation theorists such as John Barwise, John Etchemendy, John Perry and François Recanati have put forward the hypothesis that linguistic representations are situated in the sense that they are true or false only relative to partial situations which are not explicitly represented as such. Following Recanati's lead, I explore this hypothesis with respect to mental representations. First, I introduce the notion of unarticulated constituent, due to John Perry. I suggest that the question of whether there really are such constituents should divide in two issues, one concerning language and the other concerning thought. Then I formulate a dilemma that any friend of cognitive unarticulated constituents must face: alleged unarticulated constituents seem to be either articulated or non-constituents after all. The dilemma is strengthened by the fact that unarticulated constituents cannot be inferentially relevant. In §4, three constraints on entertaining situated representations are spelled out. First, although the situation within which one is immersed is not represented as such, there must be cognitive facts that make immersion possible, and explain why one is implicitly related to a particular situation as opposed to another. Second, the move from a given representation to one which articulates the situation requires the capacity to contrast the latter with others in the same range. Third, I suggest that conceptual representations differ from non-conceptual ones in the permanent possibility of detachment that they allow. I then illustrate how these constraints work in three sorts of cases. In the first, thoughts like It's raining and It's over are implicitly related to their situations via some practical capacity of keeping track of particular places or times. In the second sort of cases, the relevant situations are not given, but stipulated, like in In Constance, it's raining. Cases of the third sort are those in which an unarticulated constituent is relevant to a whole system of representations, for instance the perceptual system. In the last section, I use the notion of ad hoc representation to defend the cognitive application of situation semantics against an important objection.

Qualia, conceived as intrinsic properties of experiences, are not always welcomed by materialists, who prefer to see them as intentional properties presented in our experience. I ask whether this form of reductionism applies to the qualia of bodily awareness. According to the standard materialist theory, the intentional object of pain experience, for instance, is a bodily damage. This theory, though, is unable to account for the phenomenal difference between feeling pain 'inside' and perceiving it 'outside' (seeing oneself or another in pain). I sketch another reductionist analysis which is compatible with materialism, and according to which the intentional object of bodily awareness, unlike that of external perception, constitutively depends on the subject's experience.

Imagine that in entering a café, you are struck by the absence of Pierre, with whom you have an appointment. Or imagine that you realize that your keys are missing because they are not hanging from the usual ring-holder. What is the nature of these absence experiences? In this article, we discuss a recent view defended by Farennikova (2012) according to which we literally perceive absences of things in much the same way as we perceive present things. We criticize and reject the perceptual interpretation of absence experiences but we also reject the cognitive view which reduces them to beliefs. We propose an intermediary, metacognitive account according to which absence experiences belong to a specific kind of affective experience, involving the feeling of surprise

It is widely assumed, both in philosophy and in the cognitive sciences, that perception essentially involves a relative or egocentric frame of reference. Levinson has explicitly challenged this assumption, arguing instead in favour of the 'neo-Whorfian' hypothesis that the frame of reference dominant in a given language infiltrates spatial representations in non-linguistic, and in particular perceptual, modalities. Our aim in this paper is to assess Levinson's neo-Whorfian hypothesis at the philosophical level and to explore the further possibility that perception may not just use frames of reference other than the relative one but may also, in some cases at least, be perspective-free.

Résumé La notion de Mythe du Donné, due initialement à Wilfrid Sellars, a été conçue comme un repoussoir pour une théorie adéquate de la perception et de son rapport au jugement (ou à la croyance). Dans cet essai, j’examine la reformulation du Mythe du Donné proposée récemment par John McDowell. La seule manière d’échapper au Mythe, selon McDowell, est de considérer le contenu de l’expérience perceptive comme étant à la fois conceptuel et intuitionnel, alors que le contenu du jugement est conceptuel et propositionnel. Je critique l’approche de McDowell, en désamorçant l’une des motivations en faveur de l’existence du contenu intuitionnel, à savoir la prise en compte de la phénoménologie de la présence perceptive. Je défends la thèse selon laquelle la présence perceptive est un sentiment ou ressenti extérieur au contenu perceptif, voire à l’expérience perceptive elle-même. Cette thèse présente l’avantage de nous ramener aux raisons principales de différencier le contenu perçu du contenu jugé, qui sont d’ordre épistémologique. Comme j’essaie de le montrer, une telle différenciation ne nous engage pas au Mythe du Donné, y compris dans sa formulation mcdowellienne.